The Holographic Universe (36 page)

In fact, Stevenson has
gathered hundreds of such cases and is currently compiling a four-volume study
of the phenomenon. In some of the cases he has even been able to obtain
hospital and/or autopsy reports of the deceased personality and show that such
injuries
not
only occurred, but were in the exact location of the
present birthmark or deformity. He feels that such marks not only provide some
of the strongest evidence in favor of reincarnation, but also suggest the
existence of some kind of intermediate nonphysical body that functions as a
carrier of these attributes between one life and the next He states, “It seems
to me that the imprint of wounds on the previous personality must be carried
between lives on some kind of an extended body which in turn acts as a template
for the production on a new physical body of birthmarks and deformities that
correspond to the wounds on the body of the previous personality.”

Stevenson's theorized
“template body” echoes Tiller's assertion that the human energy field is a
holographic template that guides the form and structure of the physical body.
Put another way, it is a kind of three-dimensional blueprint around which the
physical body forms. Similarly, his findings regarding birthmarks add further
support to the idea that we are at heart just images, holographic constructs,
created by thought.

Stevenson has also noted
that although his research suggests that we are the creators of our own lives
and, to a certain extent, our own bodies, our participation in this process is
so passive as to be almost involuntary. Deep strata of the psyche appear to be
involved in these choices, strata that are much more in touch with the
implicate. Or as Stevenson puts it, “Levels of mental activity fax deeper than
those that regulate the digestion of our supper in our stomach [and] our
ordinary breathing must govern these processes.”

As unorthodox as many of
Stevenson's conclusions are, his reputation as a careful and thorough
investigator has gained him respect in some unlikely quarters. His findings
have been published in such distinguished scientific periodicals as the
American
Journal of Psychiatry
, the
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
,
and the
International Journal of Comparative Sociology.
And in a review
of one of his works the prestigious
Journal of the American Medical
Association
stated that he has “painstakingly and unemotionally collected a
Retailed series of cases in which the evidence for reincarnation is difficult
to understand on any other grounds. ... He has placed on record a large amount
of data that cannot be ignored.”

Thought as
Builder

As with so many of the
“discoveries” we have looked at, the idea that some deeply unconscious and even
spiritual part of us can reach across the boundaries of time and is responsible
for our destiny can also be found in many shamanic traditions and other
sources. According to the Batak people of Indonesia, everything a person
experiences is determined by his or her soul, or
tondi
, which
reincarnates from one body to the next and is a medium capable of reproducing
not only the behavior, but the physical attributes of the person's former self.
The Ojibway Indians also believed a person's life is scripted by an invisible
spirit or soul and is laid out in a manner that promotes growth and
development. If a person dies without completing all the lessons they need to
learn, their spirit body returns and is reborn in another physical body.

The kahunas call this
invisible aspect the
aumakua
, or “high self.” Like Whitton's
metaconsciousness, it is the unconscious portion of a person that can see the
parts of the future that are crystallized, or “set.” It is also the part of us
that is responsible for creating our destiny, but it is not alone in this
process. Like many of the researchers mentioned in this book, the kahunas
believed that thoughts are things and are composed of a subtle energetic
substance they called
kino mea
, or “shadowy body stuff.” Hence, our
hopes, fears, plans, worries, guilts, dreams, and imaginings do not vanish
after leaving our mind, but are turned into thought forms, and these, too,
become some of the rough strands from which the high self weaves our future.

Most people are not in
charge of their own thoughts, said the kahunas, and constantly bombard their
high self with an uncontrolled and contradictory mixture of plans, wishes, and
fears. This confuses the high self and is why most people's lives appear to be
equally haphazard and uncontrolled. Powerful kahunas who were in open
communication with their high selves were said to be able to help a person
remake his or her future. Similarly, it was considered extremely important that
people take time out at frequent intervals to think about their lives and
visualize in concrete terms what they wished to happen to themselves. By doing
this the kahunas asserted that people can more consciously control the events
that befall them and make their own future.

In an idea that is
reminiscent of Tiller and Stevenson's notion of a subtle intermediary body, the
kahunas believed this shadowy body stuff also forms a template upon which the
physical body is molded. Again it was said that kahunas who were in
extraordinary attunement with their high self could sculpt and reform the
shadowy body stuff, and hence the physical body, of another person and this was
how miraculous healings were effected. This view also provides an interesting
parallel to some of our own conclusions as to why thoughts and images have such
a powerful impact on health.

The tantric mystics of
Tibet referred to the “stuff” of thoughts as
tsal
and held that every
mental action produced waves of this mysterious energy. They believed the
entire universe is a product of the mind and is created and animated by the
collective
tsal
of all beings. Most people are unaware that they possess
this power, said the Tantrists, because the average human mind functions “like
a small puddle isolated from the great ocean.” Only great yogis skilled at
contacting the deeper levels of the mind were said to be able consciously to
utilize such forces, and one of the things they did to achieve this goal was to
visualize repeatedly the desired creation. Tibetan tantric texts are filled with
visualization exercises, or “sadhanas,” designed for such purposes, and monks
of some sects, such as the Kargyupa, would spend as long as seven years in
complete solitude, in a cave or a sealed room, perfecting their visualization
abilities.

The twelfth-century
Persian Sufis also stressed the importance of visualization in altering and
reshaping one's destiny, and called the subtle matter of thought
alam
almitkal
Like many clairvoyants, they believed that human beings possess a
subtle body controlled by chakralike energy centers. They also held that
reality is divided into a series of subtler planes of being, or
Hadarat
,
and that the plane of being directly adjacent to this one was a kind of
template reality in which the
alam almithal
of one's thoughts formed
into idea-images, which in turn eventually determined the course of one's life.
The Sufis also added a twist of their own. They felt the heart chakra, or
himma
,
was the agent responsible for this process, and that control of the heart
chakra was therefore a prerequisite for controlling one's destiny.

Edgar Cayce also spoke
of thoughts as tangible things, a finer form of matter and, when he was in
trance, repeatedly told his clients that their thoughts created their destiny
and that “thought is the builder.” In his view, the thinking process is like a
spider constantly spinning, constantly adding to its web. Every moment of our
lives we are creating the images and patterns that give our future energy and
shape, said Cayce.

Paramahansa Yogananda
advised people to visualize the future they desired for themselves and charge
it with the “energy of concentration.” As he put it, “Proper visualization by
the exercise of concentration and willpower enables us to materialize thoughts,
not only as dreams or visions in the mental realm, but also as experiences in
the material realm.”

Indeed, such ideas can
be found in a wide range of disparate sources. “We are what we think,” said the
Buddha. “All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make
the world.” “As a man acts, so does he become. As a man's desire is, so is his
destiny,” states the Hindu pre-Christian Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. “All things
in the world of Nature are not controlled by Fate for the soul has a principle
of its own,” said the fourth-century Greek philosopher Iamblichus. “Ask and it
will be given you. . . . If ye have faith, nothing shall be impossible unto
you,” states the Bible. And, “The destiny of a person is connected with those
things he himself creates and does,” wrote Rabbi Steinsaltz in the kabbalistic
Thirteen-Petaled
Rose.

An Indication of
Something Deeper

Even today the idea that
our thoughts create our destiny is still very much in the air. It is the
subject of best-selling self-help books such as Shakti Gawain's
Creative
Visualization
and Louise L. Hay's
You Can Heal Your Life.
Hay, who
says she cured herself of cancer by changing her mental patterning, gives
hugely successful workshops on her techniques. It is the main philosophy
inherent in many popular “channeled” works such as
A Course in Miracles
and Jane Roberts's Seth books.

It is also being
embraced by some eminent psychologists. Jean Houston, a past president of the
Association for Humanistic Psychology and current Director of the Foundation
for Mind Research in Pomona, New York, discusses the idea at length in her book
The Possible Human.
Houston also gives a variety of visualization
exercises in the work and even calls one “Orchestrating the Brain and Entering
the Holoverse.

Another book that draws
heavily on the holographic model to support the idea that we can use
visualization to reshape our future is Mary Orser and Richard A. Zarro's
Changing
Your Destiny.
In addition, Zarro is the founder of Futureshaping
Technologies, a company that gives seminars on “futureshaping” techniques to
businesses, and numbers both Panasonic and the International Banking and Credit
Association among its clients.

Former astronaut Edgar
Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon and a longtime explorer of inner as
well as outer space, has taken a similar tack. In 1973 he founded the Institute
of Noetic Sciences, a California-based organization devoted to researching such
powers of the mind. The institute is still going strong, and current projects
include a massive study of the mind's role in miraculous healings and
spontaneous remissions, and a study of the role consciousness plays in creating
a positive global future. “We create our own reality because our inner
emotional—our subconscious—reality draws us into those situations from which we
learn,” states Mitchell. “We experience it as strange things happening to us
[and] we meet the people in our lives that we need to learn from. And so we
create these circumstances at a very deep metaphysical and subconscious level.”

Is the current
popularity of the idea that we create our own destiny just a fad, or is its
presence in so many different cultures and times an indication
of something
much
deeper, a sign that it is something all human beings intuitively know
is true? At present this question remains unanswered, but in a holographic
universe—a universe in which the mind
participates
with reality and in
which the innermost stuff of our psyches can register as synchronicities in the
objective world—the notion that we are also the sculptors of our own fate is
not so farfetched. It even
seems
probable.

Three Last
Pieces of Evidence

Before concluding, three
last pieces of evidence deserve to be looked *t. Although not conclusive, each
offers a peek at still other time-transcending abilities consciousness may
possess in a holographic universe.

MASS DREAMS OP
THE FUTURE

Another past-life
researcher who turned up evidence suggestive that the mind has a hand in
creating one's destiny was the late San Francisco-based psychologist Dr. Helen
Wambach. Wambach's approach was to hypnotize groups of people in small
workshops, regress them to specified time periods, and ask them a predetermined
list of questions about their sex, clothing style, occupation, utensils used in
eating, and so on. Over the course of her twenty-nine-year investigation of the
past-life phenomenon, she hypnotized literally thousands of individuals and
amassed some impressive findings.

One criticism leveled
against reincarnation is that people only seem to remember past lives as famous
or historical personages. Wambach, however, found that more than 90 percent of
her subjects recalled past lives as peasants, laborers, farmers, and primitive
food gatherers. Less than 10 percent remembered incarnations as aristocrats,
and none remembered being anyone famous, a finding that argues against the
notion that past-life memories are fantasies. Her subjects were also
extraordinarily accurate when it came to historical details, even obscure ones.
For instance, when people remembered lives in the 1700s, they described using a
three-pronged fork to eat their evening meals, but after 1790 they described
most forks as having four prongs, an observation that correctly reflects the
historical evolution of the fork. Subjects were equally accurate when it came
to describing clothing and footwear, types of foods eaten, et cetera.